plants

Me and my mates used to believe that you could make perfume by cramming rose petals into jars of malt vinegar and washing up liquid.

We would go out on night time petal-raids of all the rose bushes in the estate. Residents would wake up to a forest of balding shrubs in their front gardens. Putting them into a washing up bowl we would then mash up the fragrant mixture with lashings of sarsons and fairy liquid. If we were feeling particularly adventurous we would do it 'wine making' style and get our bare feet in on the action. We would then wash out all my mums jam jars - anything that was just over half empty would do - and ladle the fragrant mash into the jars, where it would lay forgotten and festering until the next summer. We even designed labels and talked to our school teacher about having a stall in the school fete.

mike

when i was little, i somehow made the connection that flowers are pretty, so eating them would make me pretty too. i even told my best friend this and we would eat flower petals whenever she came over...

Melissa

When I was little, there were these huge woods behind my house that I used to explore. One day I saw someone's old bicycle that was fused with a tree that was growing, and I was convinced for years that when people didn't want their bikes, they left them for the trees to eat.

H.

I used to believe that when the leaves on the trees fell off in the winter, it ment the tree was broken. I would always say,"The tree is broken!"

when i was younger me and my sister were hula hooping and then mine broke and all these little bean things came out. so then we picked them up and planted them and waited for our hula hoop tree to grow!oops...

Emma :)

when i was six i used to play with some buttons & spread them all out on the floor, & my mum said that if i didnt put them all away they'd take root in the carpet & grow into massive button trees in the living room. it really worried me..

claire

I used to think that people made paper by cutting trees really really thin through the middle. And I was confused because I didn't know how they made so much paper because only trees with a big enough diameter could be made in the rectangular shape of a piece of paper. And I thought it was so wasteful that people just cut off the circular/round edges of the papers, and I didn't understand why they didn't just make pieces of paper circular so as to save paper.

Nathan

I used to believe that fruits were actually a hybrid of the flower of the fruit tree and of the bees/wasps that pollinated them.

I believed this because I asked my dad, an avid gardener, how grapefruit grew on our tree. Right when I asked, a bee landed inside one of the flowers. My dad pointed out the bee and told me that the bee enters the flower, which causes the grapefruit to grow, but he left out the part about the bee leaving the flower. So being an imaginative 7-year old, I concluded that because the bee never left, that must mean that it became the fruit.

For years, before I bit into any fruit, I would say a little prayer for the bees that gave up their lives to become those yummy apples, pears, and oranges that I so enjoyed.

When I was young playing in the garden in the summer, I heard my mum say that the lettuces had gone to seed. For quite a few years I thought that lettuces ran away to sea when they got big.

Annie

I didn't know that there was only one type of dandelion flower until about a year ago (I just turned 30). I always thought that there were yellow ones, and then there were those white, fluffy, puff-ball ones. I was in complete disbelief when my husband told me they were the same flower just different stages of growth. I still have a hard time believing this. I mean, I've never seen a half-yellow/half-fluffy one....

Anna

We lived out in the country, and to get to the highway and into town we had to pass a papermaking factory. When I was 8, every time we passed by I would ask what stinked, and my mother would say "The plant." So for the next two years every time we went to town I would stare at the woods opposite the factory looking for a giant purple spotted plant belching out clouds of stench.

Leah

When I was a child I used to believe that garlic would grow in braids as I used to see them at the markets. I discovered that braids of garlic were made by people only when I was a grown-up.

Alexandre

I used to believe that if you stood on a toadstool, that it would turn into a dragon and eat you. Countryside walks became lightfooted journeys of pure fear thanks to the twisted lies of my dad.

izb

When I was younger, I always wondered how the trees got leaves in the spring after they had fallen off during the fall. The most logical explanation I could come up with was that the fallen leaves magically floated back up to the branches of the tree and became green again. I would always get upset when my mother would sweep up all the dead leaves on the sidewalk outside our house because I thought she was stealing the tree's leaves.

I believed this until I was about 11 or 12 and finally realized that trees regrow their leaves every year.

Sami

When I was little, my grandpa had me convinced that telephone poles grew like that in special telephone pole forests. It took me years to realize that he was "pulling my leg" as Granma put it.

Ashley

One day my dad was picking at the bark of a tree while waiting outside somewhere and told him he should stop and he said it was good for the tree. So I peeled all the bark of a tree in out front yard thinking I was making it healthy. I got spanked for it.

Kimberly

I used to visit with the flowers in my mother’s yard when I was little. I believed they were little boys whose father told them they would be “pansies” if they played with girls’ toys.

Mojo!

I used to believe that if you stepped on a mushroom it would rain.

Anon

Every time I went into town with my mother we would walk past a store with a large (aspidistra) plant in a hideous green pot displayed in their window.

"What an abortion!" My mother would exclaim.

Many years later (and ago) when training to be a nurse, the teaching matron asked us to raise our hand if we knew the meaning of the word 'abortion'. Mine was the only hand up.